What is an Azawakh breed of dog?
The Azawakh is a pretty interesting and significant breed when it comes to understanding the evolution of dog variation. In the same way monotremes like the echidna and platypus (and also marsupials, really) are interesting and significant in that they demonstrate how reptiles transitioned into mammals (retaining many reptilian qualities), the same could be said…
The Azawakh is a pretty interesting and significant breed when it comes to understanding the evolution of dog variation.
In the same way monotremes like the echidna and platypus (and also marsupials, really) are interesting and significant in that they demonstrate how reptiles transitioned into mammals (retaining many reptilian qualities), the same could be said for Azawakhs demonstrating the earliest evolution of the livestock guardian from primitive sighthounds.
It is a primitive sighthound, but it’s application is livestock guardian and it has begun to have innate livestock guardian tendencies, despite looking (and still in large part behaving) like a rabbit hunting sighthound.
Interestingly on a genetic chart we see all the livestock guardians grouping with primitive sighthounds, and the azawakh is the connection. It’s ancestors would spawn the livestock guardian family as specialisation for the task would mount.
Those ancestors accompanied the nomadic Berber people as they penetrated into the Sahara with their goats.
Later as the Tuareg (depicted above) they would add camels and horses to their arsenal, but first it was just them, the goats, and these dogs.
Indeed these people represent perhaps the absolute earliest domestication of livestock, the earliest dog/man/livestock unit. The bezoar Ibex descended down the Zagros mountains in northern Iraq to enjoy an uneasy alliance with village dogs who would eat them sometimes, but also ward off other predators from the general area all the time, becoming a “better the devil you know” situation. It granted the ibex access to far better nutrition than it could obtain hiding up the rocky cliffs. With this, the domestic goat was born, and with that, man’s situation improved quite a bit, and these people with this new advantage over hunter gatherers then began spreading out in all directions. Around the middle east, to South Asia, over to the Mediterranean, up into the Caucasus and Europe and also down to North Africa.
With the Tuareg of the Sahara we basically see this time, right at the beginning, frozen in a living photograph. Back in Iraq, and the Caucasus and Mediterranean and etc etc things have progressed and changed as the pastoral practices have evolved, and the dogs have too. In turkey for example, the ancestor of the azawakh has since evolved into these –
But with the Azawakh of the Sahara we see how it started. A dog just dipping it’s toe into livestock guarding, still also hunting for hare and antelope with people who are just beginning to transition from hunter gatherer to herdsmen.
